Page 6 - How_Children_Learn_To_Hate_Their_Parents

Fighting in the Trenches:
If you spend enough time speaking with practitioners who work in the trenches of high conflict custody litigation you will inevitably be subject to everyone's "stories." On the surface it can seem like arrogance and puffery, one attorney bragging to another about how they "killed," "murdered", or "wiped the floor" with their adversary. The conveyance of these stories has a more substantial psychological meaning. (I am a shrink so doesn't everything? Actually in my case, no.) I think that aside from ego mongering, the stories we tell reflect the pain of having been in contact with the very worst aspects of human interaction there are.
Humans are capable of charity, forgiveness and compassion. But they are also capable of murder, brutality and hatred. These are often the commodities (yes, even murder) we encounter in the divorce and custody world.
We tell our stories to distance ourselves from the pain we encounter, so that it becomes like talking about a television show we watched with a compelling plot line but in a fictional setting. But in our stories we are the stars, and we are de-sensitized to the brutality of our very real like dramas.
I am going to tell a story about parental rejection where unsurprisingly, I am the star. However, unlike many of the stories we in the custody community tell, there's a teaching message in it to kick off our discussion about parental rejection. So here goes:
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